List of Bookmarking Sites Powered by Pligg

Feb 11, 2010 by

Despite that at the end of this post you will find a filtered and somehow manually edited list of Pligg-based social bookmarking sites, this post is rather about some tricks which can help you to quickly evaluate the quality and freshness of any directory list you find on the internet.

Finding a good list of Pligg sites

I have previously attempted to find a comprehensive and organized list of social bookmarking sites, but I just couldn’t find a sophisticated collection of these sites similar to a quality directory list for instance like info.vilesilencer.com has. This time I have decided to look for a list based on the type of the Social Bookmarking CMS. Although there are other specialized solutions for creating a social bookmarking site (like PHPdugg or Scuttle), the most popular of them is the Pligg CMS, so I have decided to seek a list of Pligg powered sites.

I have came accross some sources which listed a few hundred of Pliggs or other sites which wanted to sell me those lists for a few bucks, but what seemed for me the most promising at first sight was published in a forum thread and referenced from many other forums: this post stated that there are 9000 Pligg sites listed there.

Evaluating the available lists

As I was randomly clicked in this list quickly realized that there are many dead sites and parked domains listed here. Nevertheless I have copied this list and realized that instead of nine thousand, the list contained only about 1735 links. I have removed the unnecessary endings (/register.php for example) and also cleared the www. subdomains to have a list of domains only.

Removing duplicate entries

As I sorted this list with OpenOffice Calc, I found out that there are many duplicate entries in this list. Having pruned the duplicate rows from this list with this method the list shrinked to 1548 sites.

Retrieving Page Rank values

Then I fed this list to Alex Polski’s very handy Mass PageRank Checker (run on my own notebook with MAMP) to check the Page Rank values of the listed sites. The idea behind this was that if a site cannot get PageRank value in almost one year (or simply have lost it since the original list was published), then it is a waste of time to deal with that site. Therefore the next step was to sort the remained list by Page Rank values and eliminate those which had PageRank zero values: having removed these sites not respected by Google I ended up having a list of only 453 sites.

Checking Pligg specific URLs

The third step was to check whether the sites in question are still powered by Pligg. To validate this, first created a HTML page from this list where the links were pointing to the /upcoming.php URI, so I have added this to the end of every listed site. Since (hopefully, I am not a Pligg expert) all Pligg sites have this subpage, with this trick, I could identify the pages which are powered by pligg. Then I opened this HTML file with Firefox having the Firefox Link Checker Add-on installed and activated. This add-on simply goes through all links present in a web page and gives them different background colors and a title element to all links based on the results of the link check (with Valid, Invalid, or Forwarded status). You have to wait for a while until LinkChecker does the job, but when it finishes, you can download the web page annotated by this addon. Note: This step also could have been done before the mass page rank check.

The final step was to copy into the spreadsheet the annotated html file next to the remained list: sort it by the column which was copied from the html file and remove all those entries where the status was not “Valid link”. At the end of this process the result was a list of 271 Pligg sites what you can download from here.

Manual check of the listed sites

Having clicked on some random links listed I had to realize that the result of the latter step accomplished with the Link Checker add-on was far from satisfactory.  Some domain parking systems for instance will not give you 404 Not found error no matter what URL you request, therefore — if a parked domain still maintains its Page Rank value — these cannot be filtered with the above described methods. Therefore I decided to click through all the listed sites, and check all of them manually. At the end of this painful last step the real list of Pligg sites extracted from the original list has only 154 sites. (see below)

What was not validated?

  • Topic: Many pligg powered sites are dedicated to collect links from a certain niche topic of only those links which are written in a foreign language. To decide whether a site is useful for general link building since it accepts submissions from all topics (or languages), you should visit these sites one by one.
  • Dofollow/nofollow: Unfortunately I don’t know a good automated methot to check whether a Pligg site is dofollow or nofollow.

Conclusion

  • If you see somewhere that a certain list has many thousand sites, do not believe it automatically (see 1735 vs. 9000)
  • Things can change quite fast: a list published ten months ago can became rather outdated.
  • A long list does not automatically mean quality list: in this case many sites were already broken at the time of publishing (see comments at the original thread).
  • No automated tests can provide the same performance as the good old manual check procedure.
  • Pligg sites with good page rank values most likely concentrate on niche topics or on a foreign language. For instance one of the listed PR6 Pligg sites is a non-English site with Joomla related news, while the other is a Turkish site (which are useless for many of us trying to avoid spamming these social bookmarking sites)

The manually checked list of Pligg Sites

Page Rank 6

Page Rank 5

Page Rank 4

Page Rank 3

Page Rank 2

Page Rank 1

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How to find good lists of directories?

Jan 21, 2010 by

For many people who start to build links in a yet unknown topic, niche or language, the first step will be to look for individual directories by entering special queries to Google. It is a quite widespread method to search for different combinations of some typical keywords of your niche and expressions almost every directory has (e.g. add url, submit link). This is the reason why many directory owners see in their web statistics keywords like: financial consulting add url, add link directory education, cosmetic dentistry free add url, etc. Other, similar method is when you have some idea about the usual taxonomy used to categorize your topic, so you search for a sequence of categories like: “Regional Europe Germany” or “World Italiano”.

The problem with all of these methods which based on looking for certain keywords a directory should have in order to be relevant to your topic is that you will find a lot of inappropriate directories for your campaign, so you will have to dig through a lot of directories which are not useful or usable at all for your actual link building. In many cases the first results Google shows you will be those well established directories which accept only paid submissions, so if you are looking for free and SEO friendly directories these won’t help you too much. The second problem is that during this process you might find a lot of regional directories which accept submissions only from a certain region (try to look for directories of lawyers and you will see that the majority of them only accepts US-based professionals). Even if you sorted out all of these directories it might happen that you submit your links to a bunch of sites where although the submission form works, no one will accept it, since the directory is abandoned long time ago.

Since chances are high that someone has already done the above described labour and has already shared its experiences (here I mean directory lists) with the public, it might be more effective to look for these special directory list compilations instead of searching for individual directories. If your topic is popular enough (for instance if you are looking for UK-based directories), perhaps you’ll only have to go to the biggest specialized directory lists, find the appropriate category and start submitting. If your topic is a bit more esoteric, you will find just a couple of relevant directories there; or if you want to find more directories than these big directories of directories offer, you should use this method:

  1. Find a few relevant directory either by starting with
    1. going through the corresponding topic of Open Directory
    2. going through some of the biggest directory of directories
    3. searching for appropriate keywords in Google.
  2. Go and submit your links to these directories to see whether they fit your needs.
  3. Enter the URLs of two or three good directories you have found useful
  4. If you are lucky, Google will deliver some directory lists to you

If these directory lists have been compiled recently or they are regularly updated, you will be able to harness the knowledge of someone who has already been tried the same thing you are about to accomplish: you will not waste your time visiting paid, reciprocal or otherwise constrained directories, submitting to defunct sites, etc. Unfortunately the older these lists are the less accurate the data will be: many direcories would become paid or shut down in the meantime, for instance.

Caveat: although you can find many useful directory lists with this method, you won’t be able to find all: partly because on many web sites the longer lists are batched, so the entire list spans over more web pages, therefore sometimes the directories you seek for will not occur on the same page, so Google will not find them. On the other hand some of these directory lists are much more sophisticated than just being accessible as simple list. For instance the French directory of directories, Annuaire-info.com has a rather sophisticated form for filtering the more than 3000 links it contains. Since unfortunately these forms with multiple filtering options due to technical reasons are almost impossible to be handled by search engine bots, Google cannot access these filtered lists.

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Lists of Social Bookmarking Sites

Jan 15, 2010 by

Recently I have been spending quite much time with testing the effects of a link building done exclusively with Social Bookmarking sites. That’s the reason why I wanted to find some good lists of dofollow social bookmarking sites. And since a few weeks I am still in a need of a(n almost) perfect social bookmarking site list.

Simple social bookmarking site lists

First I started with an appropriate search expression which led me to sites like Socialposter.com. The problem with the list this site features is that although I could filter this list by dofollow/nofollow or social news/social bookmarking sites, 79 is not a big number when it comes to submitting links to sites where you can normally get only a relatively low value link.

Why I went through this list I realized what’s the difference between a social news site and a social bookmarking site and especially what’s the difference between a site under strong editorial control and an other site with basically no anti-spam measures. Finally I have opted for the latter category since I wanted to promote non-English content with this method.

Social submitter software tools

Later when I found a similar site called SocialMarker or something similar, I came across an ad of a social submitter software. There I could find a bit more extensive site list perhaps. First I have got to a special landing page which was created by the worst online marketing standards with yellow highlights, strong dashed borders and long list of testimonials and other bullshit. Finally I got the developers’ page (SEO Dev Groups’ Social Submitter) where I could download a plain list of the social bookmarking sites this software works with from here.

But before I found this PDF file I have came accross an other Social Submitter service, which is Social Maximizer. Unlike Social Submitter this is not a DIY tool but you can purchase individual submissions for a few cents with this system. This is just a side note because before I decided that before using a mass submission tool, I would do something manually, just to see a few social bookmarking sites and get some overview of this niche market.

Social Maximizer offers also a public list of the Social bookmarking sites where you can submit your web sites to: it is slightly better than Social Submitter’s — althoug URLs are not clickable, you can see the Page Rank values which can help you to decide whether to open that URL at all. (I didn’t want to use Page Rank 0 sites in the beginning.)

Now that I found a bunch of sites to work with, I guess my quest came to its end, therefore I will never find any similarly usable social bookmarking list to some of the directory lists I have already worked with. Maybe this is a sign that the social bookmarking sites are much less useful for link building, therefore no one was interested in compiling a really great resource?

Non-English social bookmarking sites

During my search for different social bookmarking lists I have found a (mainly) German Social Bookmarking site list with 78 sites included. Unfortunately I could not discover better lists than this. Then I had an idea of looking for bookmarking sites in smaller languages, but it was the (almost complete) lack of these sites was a bit disappointing. For instance the biggest Czech social bookmarking list was this I could found (already including some international sites). Having a dozen of social bookmarking sites in a country is not that much, but later I realized that this is not unique to Czech and Slovak languages, because there is only a dozen of Hungarian social bookmarking sites at the time of writing as Turbobookmark.com presented. This is an otherwise interesting concept, because I have nowhere seen a multilanguage bookmarking site submitter.

Bookmarking site lists by CMS

While doing link building on these sites I have quickly realized that the majority of these sites are powered by just a few CMS-es like Pligg or PHPDugg or sometimes Scuttle. Although I could not find any usable directory lists previously (show me a directory of PHP LD powered directories!), I was still hoping to find a good list of Pligg-powered sites for instance. I haven’t spent much time searching but the only thing I came across was this 108 Different Class C IP PHPDug Site List.

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Directory submission tools

Jan 3, 2010 by

Perhaps the most comprehensive and most up-to-date directory lists can be found at different web directory submitters a.k.a. directory submission tools. The reason for that is being a part of a (many times paid) service it is the owners interest to keep the lists continously actualized. On the other hand many of these submitter tools allow users — who have ordered the submission tool or signed up for membership — to give feedback on the directories listed. Therefore if a directory is down or the submission is closed, the users can inform about these problems the owner of the submission tool with just clicking one button.

Directory submitters working with one directory script

If a directory submission tool can handle only those directories which are powered by a certain link directory script — for instance PHP Link Directory — it not only means that such a tool can be created with less efforts, but  these type of directory submitters generally offer a more sophisticated user interface and better functions. On the other hand the directories listed in these specialized directory submitters tend to be less usable.

One good example for directory submission tools with usable directory lists is digiXMAS. Although this tool does not offer any public lists of directories, having paid for the service you will be able to access an impressive list of PHP Link Directory-based directories consisting of more than two thousand directories. The reason why this tool collects only those directories which are built with the most popular directory script is that digiXMAS can interact with  PHP Link Directory Script. As for the quality of the digiXMAS directory list: perhaps the biggest problem is that many low-quality or better to say useless directories are also included given that the owner of this tool thinks that no external link can cause a penalty in ranking.

General directory submitter tools

Directory subbitters designed to handle virtually any directory — no matter wich directory script they are powered by — tend to be less usable simply because these tools can only handle the different directories on a more general level. While offering less help in speeding up the directory submission process, these tools let you access a wider range of directories — not only those which are powered by a popular directory script, but some other, generally more valuable link collections too.

Although a free directory submission tool cannot generate enough revenue to cover the costs of maintaining an extensive link directory list, there are some directory submission tools which have quite usable lists, for instance the Omnibius tool, which is a neat combination of a Firefox add-on and a web-based submission service for completely free (you can check out the directories on Omnibius’ homepage). Although the tool collects some English web directories — since the developer of this tool is a Spanish speaker —, this tool is the most usable for Spanish-language directory submissions. Unfortunately quite a few directories are defunct or has been transformed into a paid or reciprocal directory without these changes being reflected in the lists.

One of the most accurate and up-to-date directory lists I have ever seen is maintained by a German directory submission tool: Fastbacklink.de. This tool offers an awesome list of more than four thousand link directories, but the vast majority of these lists are German-language link collections, so this tool is usable only for those who build links on the German web. The biggest shortcoming of this directory list (and of course the tool itself) is that you cannot filter the directories by topics. Having listed hundreds of niche and regional directories the lack of proper categorisation wastes you a lot of time while using this submitter.

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Specialized web directory lists

Dec 28, 2009 by

While creating a directory just by installing a directory script and starting to collect different directories might seem a relatively simple task to accomplish, but if you want to own a really usable directory list, not only you should keep that list up-to-date (because web directories often change: many of the free directories become later paid ones, and many of them are just shut down after a certain period), but  you should also collect a bit more information than a link a title and a short description, or simply give something more to help link builders and directory owners.

If you have managed to collect thousands of web directories, even a relatively simple concept would make your list usable. While the web-directories.ws directory list is built with PHP Link Directory Script without adding any considerable extra feature to the standard PHPLD feature set, the size of this collection makes it an excellent resource especially when you are looking for regional or niche directories.

Custom web sites like  Info Vilesilencer Directory List — which is most likely the oldest list of its kind — can offer some handy features for sorting and handling directory lists during a certain link building campaign. This site for instance not only collects information about the Page Rank and Alexa Rank values of the directories, but also has its own ranking system in order to help to evaluate the importance of  the directories listed. In addition to this, the site also lets you to download its directory list in a downloadable excel spreadsheet.

Some directory lists, like directorycritic.com accept only paid or reciprocal listing when it comes to submitting, others like the Info Vilesilencer directory list offer free submission but manually check certain requirements before listing the submitted directories.

A good directory list usually displays some additional info about the directories such as the type of the directory (Free, Reciprocal, Paid), IP address, web pages indexed by Google, age of the site, etc., but as far as I know only linksadmin.net collects automatically activity data about the listed web directories, such as the date of the last update or the date of the latest submission accepted. Sorting by this information can you prevent you from wasting your precious time for submitting your site to defunct directories.

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Simple lists of directories

Dec 15, 2009 by

There are a lot of lists of directories compiled by different webmasters here and there, basically published in personal blogs or in webmaster forums. Although these lists are much less than a directory of directories, they are useful resources if you are looking for directories covering a certain niche. Many times these lists are a kind of by-product of a link building campaign, thus reflecting the experience of the link builder who published that list.

There are certain problems with these lists however: the worst is when someone submits to a lot of directories, and when it is done simply includes all of the directories where he just sent the link suggestions. It’s better when only those link directories get listed which accepted those link submissions. Last but not least the best of all, when a list is actively maintained, simply because the link builder in question uses that list as an everyday tool for link building campaigns.

So when you come across a simple directory list, first check the publication date. If it was published more than a year ago, then chances are high that the list will not be really useful, just because there will be many dead links and some other links where the description will not match the actual state (e.g. a link directory became a paid directory meanwhile).

A typical example of these simple directory lists can be found at http://www.evilscience.org/list-of-free-directories-from-serbia-croatia-and-bosnia/ Although this list was compiled more than a year ago most likely it is still the most comprehensive list of ex-Yugoslavian (That is: Croatian, Serbian and Bosnian) link directories.

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Lists of searching engines as searching aids

Dec 1, 2009 by

Lists of searching engines as searching aids

Before Google became the tool for searching on the web thus signalling the end of the golden era of web directories, there were more — equally viable — options to choose for web search. Since these crawler based search engines or human edited link directories could in many cases cover only a certain region or provide search results in a certain language, once you needed to search in an other language or wanted to find information related to other countries than US, knowing which search tools covered a certain geography or language might have been handy. That’s the reason why the first directories of directories (and search engines) emerged.

search engine colossus screen captureOne of the oldest but still maintained link collection, and  a good example for these search engine lists is Search Engine Colossus. This directory lists the search tools organized by countries and antonomous regions (or something like that). As for the quality of  this web site, given the age (more than 10 yrs old!) and the scope of the site there are quite a few search engines and directories listed which are practically defunct by now although still online (not accepting new link submissions, not crawling the web anymore).  The age is also reflected in the oldschool design of the site.  Nevertheless the page is still maintained, and still offers a good starting point if you want to discover a specific region on the web. In addition to this if you possess a local search engine a link directory, it is worth contacting the site owner: Bryan Strome, since this site can lead some traffic to your search solution, and it could pass some link juice as well (at the time of writing the site is unranked by Google’s PageRank algo though).

Other example of these worldwide search engine lists can be found on an Italian site called Segnali di Vita (means “signs of life” in English). Although the purpose and the concept of the entire site is not quite clear for me, this link collection has most likely a higher traffic than Search Engine Colossus has — based on my experience, you get slightly more visitors from this site if your directory is listed at both sites.

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